How to put WoW Insider on your web site and computer
Everyone these days either has a blog or a guild site that they post to regularly; and it's especially common amongst the World of Warcraft and the greater MMORPG community. One of the neat features of most of these sites is that they allow you to subscribe to other blogs, like WoW Insider. The software of these sites and tools can put up our headlines in easy to access places, so you and all your friends can stay up to date on the latest World of Warcraft news.Getting this setup might seem like a hard thing to do, but it's really not. In fact, with our guide, complete with pictures, you'll be able to get WoW Insider's latest news on your site in no time! We give you step-by-step instructions for sites and software like Guild Portal, Guild Launch, Blogger.com, Word Press, vBulletin, Google Reader, Outlook, and more. We also tell you the info you need to get our news setup on any other site.
Continue reading on for a complete list of guides we provide.
First a bit of background. We are a blog that publishes our news on what's called an RSS Feed. That's an acronym for Really Simple Syndication Feed. Basically it's a really cool technology that lets other sites syndicate what we publish. Back before RSS was invented, you used to have to manually go through and parse the HTML to syndicate a website's news. Not only was that illegal in some cases, it was also very time consuming and complicated. But RSS solves all that because it's so easy.
All you need to syndicate an RSS feed, like the one published by WoW Insider, are two things. First, you need a reader widget of sorts to put the content on your site, and then you need the RSS feed address. The RSS feed address for WoW Insider is http://wow.joystiq.com/rss.xml and will work with any RSS reader.
What are some of these RSS readers? Chances are your site already has one. Especially if you blog with popular blog software or use a popular guild website. Even if your site doesn't, you're not out of luck since we cover getting one setup with PHP (a programming language – don't be concerned, chances are you won't have to worry about this!).
Check out our guides for these different sites and pieces of software:
- Blogger.com
- Wordpress.com
- Google Reader
- Guild Launch
- Guild Portal
- vBulletin Board
- Microsoft Windows Vista
- Microsoft Outlook
- Generic RSS feed
- PHP scripts
Happy blogging!
Filed under: How-tos, Odds and ends, Guides






Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
fLUx Mar 28th 2008 9:16AM
I'll tell you what we need, a way to get WoWInsider storys INTO WoW.
Proberly involve a windows/mac app to update, download and inject the storys into the WoW addon data.
(hell, somebody could simply create a rss reader for use inside of wow, and have more than just wowinsider)
Would be rad, being able to login to WoW in a morning, and read wow insider while you are doing your dailys! :D
NeSuKuN Mar 28th 2008 9:58AM
I have done this, but as it's agains the TOC and/or EULA I wont publish it :P
Chris Mar 28th 2008 9:34AM
I use google reader and bloglines, and your feed is the only one that doesn't publish all entries to the RSS. In other words, only 1/5 posts on your site actually show up in the various RSS readers I use.
p-diddy Mar 28th 2008 11:05AM
Huh? I use google's reader and I've had no problems with WoWInsider's feed. Maybe the posts aren't the full posts and you have to "jump" to read the whole article, but that's intended (ad revenue)
-p-
Chris Mar 28th 2008 2:24PM
Let me clarify - if I click on the wowinsider feed in google reader, all posts show up. However, most times the feed link ("wowinsider" in the feed list) does not show unread entries. As such, my global reading list does not contain most new posts.
Taeous Mar 28th 2008 10:01AM
I prefer to use a handy FireFox addon called Sage. Check it out here: http://sage.mozdev.org/
Ranir Mar 28th 2008 10:00AM
I use the RSS feed in google reader and it is pretty good - never miss an entry. What I really mislike are those "continue reading" links and "after the jump" comments. I understand the need for advertising, but would like a banner in the feed far more than the links.
Kenneth Apr 9th 2008 8:59AM
I use google reader and get all the updates. So you might have the wrong feed you're looking into.
G Mar 29th 2008 6:59AM
You can also plug WOW Insider's RSS feed into FeedBurner and use that to put the latest headlines on any other web site via Javascript or even a GIF image. I'm doing this for our guild's web site. Probably the only downside is that they don't seem to cache well, so it can load slowly sometimes.
Chris Nolan.ca Apr 9th 2008 10:39AM
If we're talking making your blog or guild site cooler by pulling data from elsewhere, check out my tool for having character/armory tooltips of your toons
http://apps.facebook.com/hearthstone/news/14/item
amg Apr 21st 2008 8:18AM
What about dropping it into a Google Groups site? They don't have an RSS widget (afaik).... any thoughts?